Archive for June, 2015

After working on the base issues of different crashes in the alpha build the developer team will release the first public beta of Firefox 31.6.0 ESR for OS/2 in the next few days. This will be the first version of Firefox ESR 31 after the ESR 24 release last year. The new build will also contain a fix for the broken audio backend seen on ESR 24 and newer by using the libkai audio framework. The release is again delayed because of the non existing security update version 31.8.0, this was just released today (07/03/2015). Meanwhile another screenshot of the alpha build from june:

Firefox 31.6.0 ESR for OS/2 Alpha Nightly

The Firefox 31 ESR release needs a new set of runtime libraries:

libc 0.6.6 (libc066.dll)

gcc 4.9.2.1 (gcc1.dll, stdcpp6.dll)

freetype 2.5.5.1 (freetyp6.dll)

zlib 1.2.5 (z.dll)

libpng 1.6.16 (png1616.dll)

The additional runtine libs from the ESR 24 release are also required, when the release is ready there will be a complete list. Hopefully the last update to this post, on 07/09/2015 the merge of the ESR 31.8.0 code base was finished, in case no last minute bugs will show up the release is ready to go.

The future
With 31.6.0 being the alpha build and 31.8.0 the public build for OS/2 – this version is the last supported ESR version from the Firefox ESR 31 branch. Mozilla’s next ESR version based on Firefox 38 was already released. The next task for the port should be the move to the current ESR 38 branch before the one year support of this ESR version has finished.
Update (07/17/2015): The project page now list one new ticket for the upgrade to Firefox ESR 38. The release of the 31.8.0 ESR version is still in question because the last change was the work on the enablement of the FFMPEG/libav backend which turned out to be not working because of bugs in the sources.
Update (07/21/2015): There is again a bug in the mozilla source code for the osfile I/O API that assumes unicode compatibility with no check, there’s now a workaround added that fixes this problem but another ‘translation’ code has to be added to another module before this issue is completely fixed.

The Developer Team for the OS/2 port of the Firefox 31 ESR branch have now an unstable alpha build running after fighting with the code because Mozilla removed the specific OS/2 code from the code tree in newer versions. There is still some work left to get a stable build but its a big step forward for the next release. Below is the screenshot from the first running alpha release.